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With Google, the product is you. You (your demographic profile) is sold, by Google, to their advertisers. This includes potentially identifying information.

• patmcc 12y ago
  That's completely untrue. Advertisers come to Google and say "we want to sell this, people in these demographics would like it" and Google shows it to me or you based on what it knows about us. Google knows lots about me; people who buy adwords don't.
  • exceptthis 12y ago
    They know that every person who clicks on their add is within the demographic profile they targeted. They do, indirectly, buy that information - and there's no way to operate Google's business model without that remaining true.
  • pmelendez 12y ago
    Google does help them (google's advertisers) to track you indirectly. Not throught the adwords networks but throught the RTB network (DoubleClick). You can easily validate this by checking all the "pixels" (in the RTB sense) that are being deployed by Google. In their defense, they do mask a lot of things so stuff like the full IP address are not available (last time I worked on that they just give you the three first segments) but still quite a few information was available to target your demographic segment. Edit: For downvoters and people curious about tracking pixels: - https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/1347585?hl=en https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/1347585?hl=en - https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/2508388?hl=en https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/2508388?hl=en
    • bduerst 12y ago
      Tracking pixels are pretty standard for the web analytics industry, and are a tool to aggregate information, not sell. Google, Facebook, Optimizely, Marketo, etc. all use them. If you really want to learn more, you can read the wikipedia page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tracking_pixel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tracking_pixel